Celebrity, Pedophilia, and Ideology in American Culture reveals the connections between rapacious capitalism and the rape of children. The twenty chapters, which span the analysis of childhood, celebrity culture, important books and films on pedophilia and violence, post-9/11 theology and public rhetoric, and killing for fame, in an interrelated fashion cover intrinsically important areas of ideology. The book develops detailed theoretical insights in cultural theory and philosophy. With the economic meltdown of the first decade of the twenty-first century, we are witnessing the inability of the free market to cope with our contemporary world, which is not limitless, in terms of knowledge and the power of science to dominate the material world and resources. Child sexual abuse here functions as a metaphor for the rapacious attack on the planet, which knows no limit penetrating everything, even--and most especially--the weakest form, at every opportunity, corrupting the future. The pervasiveness of child sexual abuse, for many, cannot be argued with, and, in a postmodern world where truth is anathema, it offers a form of truth and is concerned with the absolute limit. Stimulating, suggestive, and sometimes provocative, the capaciousness of these essays will inform everyone interested in the media, popular culture, theory and theology, politics, and the zeitgeist. Celebrity, Pedophilia, and Ideology in American Culture is an important book for all media studies, popular culture, cultural theory, and American studies collections.

This book is a unique study of the historical, theoretical, and cultural interpretations of ‘madness’ including interviews with those who have experiences of ‘madness’. It takes a transdisciplinary approach, employing historical, psychological, and sociological perspectives through an intersectional lens. This work explains how the prioritization of thinking over feeling in Western thought means the transrational imagination has frequently been negated in tackling mental health with detrimental results. This book, therefore, examines creative media, especially film, as a transrational form of human expression for healing and wellbeing, along with television, theatre, social media, music, and computer games. ‘Madness’ with regards to gender, sexuality, adolescence, and class in media and film is interrogated, as well as ‘madness’ and race through a focus on colonialism, post-colonialism, and psychiatry. It analyses group psychosis, including celebrity culture, and the ‘madness’ of leaders and gurus. This book challenges the lasting influence of the Age of Reason by furthering our understanding of the value of transrationality and the diverse ways of being human.

Questioning what “makes” a celebrity and how celebrity is controlled, dispersed and received are aspects branching out of (Extra)Ordinary’s debate over celebrities as ordinary/extraordinary. Jade Alexander and Katarzyna Bronk, together with the authors whose chapters make up this inter-disciplinary discussion, not only utilise the existing research on celebrity and fandom, but they also go beyond the often-quoted theorists to engage in multidirectional analyses of what it means to be a celebrity, and what influence they have on the consuming public. The present book provides an avenue for exploring not just what celebrity is as a discursive construction, but also how this involves a complex interplay between celebrities, the media and the audience.

The twenty-first century has seen an explosion in the ways and means in which children can become part of celebrity culture. With the rise in popularity of reality TV, child beauty pageants, talent shows, and social media platforms, as well as more established routes to fame through TV, cinema, theatre and music, the number of children establishing a presence in public life continues to proliferate. Childhood and Celebrity brings together international scholarly writing and research about famous children, and representations of childhood, from a range of disciplines including Childhood Studies, Celebrity Studies, Cultural Studies and Film Studies in order to open up a theoretical space in which to explore and understand the complex relationship between contemporary childhood and celebrity culture. This unique collection includes detailed case studies of specific child performers such as McCaulay Culkin and Miley Cyrus, histories of child stars in the ‘Golden Age’ of Hollywood, analyses of representations of children in film and discussions of children as media creators and producers. Key themes of transgression, gender, ‘coming of age’, childhood innocence and children’s rights recur in the chapters and present a compelling argument for the emergence of the field of Childhood and Celebrity as an area of study in its own right.

This book investigates the changes and continuities in the ways in which sexual violence has been interpreted and represented in Britain since 1965. It explores the representational trail of the Moors murders and subsequent trial of 1966, the emergence of age of consent abolitionism in the 1970s, Cleveland’s child sexual abuse crisis of 1987-8, and 2010 and 20s contemplations on the Jimmy Savile scandal. Harnessing research into popular media forms and a huge range of personal, political and professional records, Nick Basannavar carefully parses and illustrates the ways in which journalists, medical workers, politicians, lobbyists and other groups assembled and animated their narratives, revealing complex rhetorical and emotional processes. This book challenges problematic conceptual dichotomies such as silence/noise or ignorance/knowledge. It shows instead that although categories such as ‘child sexual abuse’ and ‘paedophilia’ may be relatively recent linguistic value-constructs, sexual violence against children has existed and been represented across historical moments, in changeable and challenging ways.